April 14th, 2006
I’d like to say TGIF but quite frankly the day of the week means nothing to me. The weekend may be more time alone at home to sulk and stare at an empty inbox or an unrining telephone or an IM-less Y!M.
OK for about seven hours Sunny and Queer Eye will be there to distract me a little tomorrow but then it’ll be just me and the kitties and my runaway thoughts again.
I talked to SQ last night from about 11:30pm to about 1:30 (she’s on the West Coast, you know). She could tell I was distressed and didn’t want to let another day go by without trying to talk to me about another perspective and offer some suggestions on handling the “situation.”
The “situation” goes back to that earlier post about the PBeM issue but it goes back further than that and it doesn’t and it’s about other issues and it’s really about being angry at one person and what she did in specific and hurt by what N2 did or didn’t do or isn’t doing or may be acting and they’re kind of separate but they’re entertwined and to tell it my brain kind of goes off on tangents. At least I’ve figured out that I’ve been crying since Wednesday night but the tears are for N2 and not for the stupid game or the way that the GM bitch handled things. But I believe I deserve an appology by both of them.
So, anyway, SQ pointed out something I already knew. When your brain is running in place over the same track, it sometimes help to write it down so your brain can take a break, knowing it’s been put somewhere for save keeping. Well, I’m going to try. I appologize if this doesn’t make sense.
Last year, during my depressive episode, right around Hurricane Katrina, GM bitch and SQ first approached me about playing Willow in a Buffy/Angel PBeM. Normally I don’t play cannon characters as I don’t feel comfortable taking on already created characters but I was somewhat interested. However, between my depression and the Survival Guilt of Katrina, I decided not to join. I decided I couldn’t commit to the game at the time. A month or two later, they came back again as the girl they’d gotten to play Willow was a “nut job” and I had to come and save them. Reluctantly, I came to play but admittely I felt a little thrown into the wolves and unsure of myself.
Not to worry, I quickly discovered that GM bitch had plans for everything and she was constantly IMing me and sending me emails with instructions with what to do with Willow’s character. The one time I was actually doing something with Willow on my own, I was told to drop what she was doing and go do something else — when I complained about this last night, I was told by SQ that I should have spoken up then and therefore it’s my fault; I didn’t know I had a voice, but oh, well.
Anyway, like I said in the previous post, I kind of dropped the ball with the game. There was a four post per week minimum in “active” threads. I did find this difficult as one of the players I was in a scene with almost never posts more than once or twice a week herself if that, which has always been one of my pet peeves with her in other games. Then SQ moved all of our characters into another scene filled with other characters, lots of other characters and it was total chaos and it was, to me, impossible to figure out who was talking to who and where exactly everyone was standing. Not everyone was including such information in their “required” header information.
So,GM bitch sent an email to the game’s discussion list telling me to have Willow leave the new character she’d just brought with another character named Trysta and go look for Giles. So, I sent an email to the discussion list asking where Trysta was, if Trysta and Willow knew each other and if Trysta would mind telepathic contact.
That above email is the one that triggered everything supposedly. I was told that I was posting too many emails asking for help about being lost. (Mind you out of the 1099 posts on the discussion list since I’d joined in October I’d posted 44 total and only one asked a question about where anyone was, etc.) Anyway, that’s when suddenly N2 needed to “talk” to me.
O.K. Well, if you go read the other post, you know that sometime on Wednesday, N2 just plain stopped speaking to me. Certainly before that she wasn’t listening to anything I was telling her. I know specifically that I’d mapped out for her how I was going to be answering PBeM posts on a schedule of 30 min before bed or 30 min before work from then on. She obviously didn’t pay attention to this as you will see…and this was one of the first things I said in my initial appology to her on Wednesday.
When I got done working with Sunny Wednesday night, she still hadn’t answered any of my emails. I tried IMing her but she was very monosyllbic and cold. You know, you can always tell when someone doesn’t want to talk to you. You just know. So I said good night.
But I wrote another email and told her that I was very worried about our friendship, that whatever was up with the games, they were just games and that our friendship was certainly more important than that. I honestly told her that I was very depressed and hurt and that I needed her friendship and I wanted to fix whatever it was that had gone wrong.
I’ve never received a response.
I started crying that night. I cried most of yesterday.
True to my word, when I got up yesterday, I answered all open tags for my PBeM characters and then went to work. When I got to work there was an email from N2 asking me if I’d gotten “the email from GM bitch”. I replied “no”.
I got GM bitch’s email right after. (Please note that the time stamp said she’d mailed it from Austrailia on Wednesday at about 3:30pm)
It was a long unpleasant (in my opinion) email that basically said that N2 had “gone to bat” for me but GM bitch had made the decision to take away Willow from me. However, they didn’t want me to quit either game (I also play in her Firefly game) so I could make up a non-cannon character if I wanted.
Well, I was pissed off. I mean, why come to me on Tuesday night and tell me that I play a great Willow and that they don’t want me to quit playing Willow but thay they’re worried that I can’t keep up with the upcoming storyarc so they need to know if I can commit to it, let me commit to it and begin posting and then take the character away? What a friggin’ bitch?!
It felt like I was just starting to pull myself up out of the hole and she stepped on my fingers and kicked me in the stomach. Don’t make an offer you aren’t willing to go through with. And certainly don’t offer me a concolation prize. I only was in the game to play Willow. Fuck that! Which they begged me to do!
And this morning I realized why it really and truly upset me. It’s the associated memory. The rejection. The being fired. I know SQ kept saying that I wasn’t run out of the game because I had an option, but it wasn’t really an option to me. Why would I have stayed, really? It’d be like staying at a job after you’ve been demoted.
So, I quit the Buffy game.
Do I regret it. A little but only in that I feel like they should apologize and offer the character back, which they won’t. As SQ says, it’s a done deal.
So, GM bitch is at the top of my hate list right now which is kind of hard because I don’t want to have anything to do with her and the only game I have left is her other game and quite frankly I don’t trust her and despite what SQ says I do think she hunts for dysfunctional drama and it wouldn’t suprise me if she had a little chat room set up last night to talk bad about me and my little meltdown as I left the Buffy game.
What really pisses me off about her is that she always assumes the worst about me. She thinks I’m too negative and assumes that I mean something seriously when I’m joking and has accused me of such and told me to use Smileys when I’m being funny but then doesn’t believe the Smileys either.
Personally, she’s made this whole PBeM experience rather miserable. If it stays this way, maybe it’s time to finally leave roleplaying all together.
O.K. so back to N2.
After I wrote a nasty note to GM Bitch quiting her game and thanking her from always knowing when to kick me when I’m trying to pull myself up, I got N2’s response to my email that I hadn’t gotten “the email from the GM bitch”.
You didn’t… but now you’re posting like mad… cowinkydink?
You no longer have Willow, hon.
[N2]
Well, this kind of pissed me off.
I got [GM bitch]’s post after I got your email, after I had spent my morning
posting my posts like I told you I would do yesterday — post before work.
This is such bullshit.
It doesn’t matter. I’m quiting Buffy. I might quit the other game too.
Thanks so much to all of you for kicking me in the stomach while I was
trying to pull myself up. You know what, I really needed some
understanding this week and I really needed my friends and I was really
trying to pull myself out of and sort things out the last few weeks but I
don’t need all this shit from people who are supposed to be my friends.
You people obviously live on this drama. I did what I was supposed to do.
I posted my characters more than once this week and then I get this email
taking my character away. Bullshit.
I never received a response.
Last night my Y!M status message was “trust no one,” which SQ made me change. It now says, “It sucks to be Frodo.”
I feel betrayed by N2. I feel like she wasn’t there for me as a friend when I needed her. I feel like she repeatedly hasn’t been listening to me talk about my therapy and my treatment and my plans to get better and I’m hurt, particularly since she also suffers from depression. I resent that she judged me and told me that 20% of my problem is me and that she thinks I’ve gotten worse and that my meds aren’t working and then turned her back on me when my life went into crisis mode. I am hurt that our friendship is intermingled in this mess.
I have expressed in the past a dislike of having GM bitch send N2 to do her dirty work. This is why. If this gets fixed, I think I’m going to have to be more aggressive in explaining that in the future, either GM bitch comes to me or she sends someone else.
SQ tried to point out that N2 and I are alike in many ways, one of which is an aversion to conflict. It’s possible that once GM bitch made her decision on Wednesday, N2 just stopped communicating with me because she was afraid. Still, that hurts me too.
Anyway, this morning I sent one last olive branch to N2, an email telling her that I’d like to talk on the phone this weekend to straighten this out. There’s no reason that a stupid game should screw up our friendship. However I told her that the ball is in her court.
I have had no response.
Tags: PBeM, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, Firefly, friendship, dysfunctional drama
October 11th, 2005
O.K. I love Firefly and I want Joss Whedon to succeed in making enough money from the movie to get the “O.K.” from Universal Pictures to make the planned two sequels, but there’s a limit to how far I’d go. I mean, I went openning night to see Serenity and I may go see it again if it’s still in theaters this weekend, but I admit there are definitely bigger fans than me.
Like, for instance, this unknown man who bought 320 Serenity tickets on September 30th and then stood out front of the Regal Cinema Cascade 16 theater (wherever that is) and gave them away.
O.K. There’s a huge movement by Firefly fans, better known as Browncoats, worldwide to convert as many people to Firefly fandom as possible. I get that. But the cost of 320 movie tickets? Think about it. Unless your Bill Gates, and it may have been I suppose, that’s going to cut seriously into your monthly budget.
Still, hats off to the mystery fan. I hope you got more than a few converts. At the very least, thanks for contributing to the openning weekend’s take-in. 
Meanwhile, if you haven’t seen it yet, or even if you have, definitely go check out Serenity. Joss Wheddon really has done a brilliant job from casting to imagery to storytelling — certainly it’s easy to believe these “Big Damn Heroes” are real and certainly you can’t help but cheer for them, flaws and all.
Tags: Firefly, Serenity
October 8th, 2005
This is Izzy’s introductory post in the PBeM I joined.
Who: Izzy
Where: cockpit of the Tianlong
She’d crashed once. During the war.
That had been an unpleasant experience to say the least. Her fighter had taken an unlucky hit that had knocked out part of her propulsion system and she’d been sent spinning toward the unwelcoming view of a mountainside.
This was worse.
Cold fingers touched her forehead and came away with a sticky, wet substance. Green eyes tried to focus but it occurred to her that there was nothing to focus on. Not when her eyes were closed. Slowly, painfully, she opened her eyes. It didn’t help. The cockpit was dark. Not a single light.
“Gos se,” she whispered, though the sound of her own voice seemed faint. [Chinese translation: Crap.]
Flashes now. Reavers by her guess. She’d heard tell of them — men gone crazy on the edge of space. Wild tales told in unsavory drinking establishments along the Rim. Something had given her a chill the moment she saw the ship, but the captain of the Tianlong had insisted they contact the junk heap of a ship. He was all about making friends on the Rim — a sure sign he’d just arrived from the Core.
It occurred to her that she was floating well off of the floor of the ship. That meant the gravity was out as well as the power. She took a slow cold breath as it occurred to her that the air was probably shot as well. She tried to turn but with nothing really to push off of, she was like a fish out of water. Finally she rotated around enough that she could see out of the window.The only light she had was that of distant stars. The view before her had kept her warm at night during her time in prison — just the dream or hope of one more moment in the Black, free — but now…panic.
Around her she could see the floating wreckage of…the Tianlong. More panic set in as she noticed the body of the cook floating next to what appeared to be part of the engine.
That’s when she realized she was alone in the Black. Dead in space like the Tianlong. Well, worse. The question then would be if she bleed to death first or just ran out of air. Perhaps she’d be lucky and freeze to death.
Then again. This was probably better than the Reavers.
Tags: writing, fiction, Firefly, Serenity, Fan Fiction
October 8th, 2005
I wrote the following to be a writing sample for an audition for a Firefly PBeM game. It’s been a long, long time since I’ve had to audition for a game. Usually I go on reputation because I usually know someone. Izzy is an original character, an ex-ace fighter pilot with a history with both the Alliance and the Independents which left her liking neither.
Izzy pulled her Stetson down low over her brow as she settled into the back corner of the hole in the wall bar. The bottle of whiskey sat on the unfinished table between her and the the off-duty fed squad who’d just joined the usual rabble. The weight of her six-shooter in the hip-holster was heavy against her leg.
She was between jobs and the gorram feds where going to make it harder to find work — honest or not. Not to mention, they’d likely tear this dump apart as the beer flowed. Glancing around, it occurred to her that there weren’t nearly enough doxies in the place to keep the men distracted. Yet she didn’t move except to pour another shot and kick it back. She almost dared any of them to approach her. She hadn’t been in a satisfying fistfight in awhile and it’d be mighty satisfying to beat the crap out of some drunken feds.
The right corner of her lips curled upward as she settled in.
Oh, and I got in. Wish me luck.
Tags: writing, Firefly, Serenity, Fan Fiction, fiction
October 1st, 2005
Posted
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My Life,
Politics & Causes,
Books, Music, Movies, & T.V.,
Geekery,
Wellness,
Discombobulated,
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Hurricane Rita by
n. mallory
- I saw Serenity last night. It’s a beautifully done film; Joss Wheddon should be proud, but as a Firefly fan, I wish I hadn’t seen it yet. Since I don’t want to spoil it for others. I’ll wait to explain. I’m glad now that I couldn’t go to see it for free in Boston on Tuesday in exchange for a written review. I don’t think I could have given it a fair, unbiased review so soon after seeing it. But it really was a brilliant movie. It’s certainly a good two hour ride.
- One of my co-workers is just giddy over DeLay’s indictment. I’m still living in a world of disbelief in the system. I don’t believe anything will really come of it because this administration and the Republican “base” appear untouchable. The sins they accused the Democrats of are sins that they can commit without fear of conviction or loss of faith from their “base”.
- It’s friggin’ cold here in Maine all of a sudden. Still no Fall in the trees.
- Someone from the insurance company for the lady who hit me called and left a message. I’m guessing it’s about the pain and suffering. I told my mom I really care about the lost money from having to drop from the art class, but she thinks I should ask for more. I wonder if I could get them to pay for a maid.
- My mom is finally home safe. Apparently Red Cross tried to force them to evacuate from Houston and they got trapped in that massive traffic jam. She got off the interstate and stayed in another Red Cross shelter. They ended up at some gas station in the middle of nowhere waiting for like 6 hours in line to use a one pump nozzle. Once they made it to Austin, they had to turn around and go back to Houston, where someone had “taken” my mother’s ultimate Red Cross disaster notebook that she’d spent 20 years putting together. That was probably an accident. Anyway, she’s home now and debating retiring, which is a shame.
- I’m now certified. Well, I’m certified in this new interface engine. At least that’s what the piece of paper I got yesterday says.
- If mold grews in warm, wet environments, will the cold of a Maine winter kill it, I wonder.
- Since it got cold, I have two new furry best friends…
- I’ve got a pimple on my nose right next to my nose stud. Ow.
Tags: discombobulated, Serenity, Firefly, Tom DeLay, Red Cross, Hurricane Rita
2 comments See also in
My Life, Politics & Causes, Books, Music, Movies, & T.V., Geekery, Wellness, Discombobulated, The World, Natural Disasters, Hurricane Rita
I watched the first two discs of Firefly again over the weekend. I forgot how fun they talk.
